Joe Sixsmith Books in Order

The Joe Sixsmith novels follow a very different kind of investigator from Andy Dalziel or Peter Pascoe. Joe is a middle aged, balding, black ex lathe operator in the fictional town of Luton, laid off from the car plant and not at all sure what comes next. Private detection is something he more or less stumbles into rather than a long held ambition.

In Blood Sympathy, the first novel, Joe is still close to the factory floor and the chapel choir. A small favour for a friend pulls him into a case involving racist harassment, a misleading counselling service and a death that nobody else takes seriously. By the end of it he has discovered that listening carefully, asking awkward questions and simply sticking around can take you surprisingly far.

Later books build on that unlikely career. In Born Guilty a body in a cardboard box left in a churchyard leads Joe through a set of interlocking problems involving an elderly colonial widow, a punk bank clerk and a deputy head teacher whose private life is less respectable than it seems. Killing the Lawyers finds him both suspected of murder and hired to protect a star athlete, while Singing the Sadness sends him with his chapel choir to rural Wales, where a burning cottage and an unidentified woman turn a singing weekend into a complicated case.

The final novel, The Roar of the Butterflies, throws Joe into the uneasy world of a posh golf club and a high profile tournament when a gifted black golfer is pushed to withdraw. As usual, he has to navigate money, prejudice and small town resentments armed mostly with persistence, decency and a knack for being underestimated.

Tone is key to the series. The books are lighter on overt violence than many police procedurals, and Joe survives as much through social intelligence and stubborn honesty as through deduction. Hill uses him to look at race, class and changing work without turning the stories into lectures, helped along by a cast of relatives, neighbours and clients who are often as interested in Joe's love life as in his safety.

Where Dalziel and Pascoe wrestle with institutional power, Joe spends a lot of time in back streets, launderettes, chapels and cheap pubs, watching how decisions made elsewhere ripple down into ordinary lives. The mysteries still matter, but the pleasure lies just as much in his rueful internal commentary, his affection for his cat and Aunt Mirabelle, and his small but hard won victories.